Recent Study Confirms Parents Still Lose Sleep Worrying About Grown Children
Recent Study Confirms Parents Still Lose Sleep Worrying About Grown Children
-Being a parent means thinking of the well being of your child, no matter what their age is. Even if they are full adults,we worry about their health, relationships, careers, financial situation and overall wellbeing.
-Just recently, a study has concluded that many parents are still worrying and losing sleep even though their children are adults.
-The study conducted by Amber J.Seidel of Penn.State University analyzed the relationship between parent’s worry over their children, and their sleep patterns, and showed that this stress remains into the child’s adulthood.
SEIDEL, FOR THE CBS NEWS, ADMITTED:
‘I feel that many share this value, yet I think much of the socialization in our culture focuses on family when children are younger,.I seek to study topics that help us understand how family continues to be a central part of our lives throughout adulthood, and I encourage considering family-level influences in all situations.’
-This study was published in the journal, The Gerontologist, and involved 186 heterosexual, middle-aged married couples from the Family Exchanges Study. The three main questions of the study were: how much support they offer, how stressed they are, and how much sleep they are getting.
-The parents were asked to rate the different types of support they offer their adult children on a scale of 1-8, with 1 being daily and 8 being no more than once a year. Types of support ranged from practical help such as financial assistance to emotional support including advice and discussing daily events.
-The parents also rated how stressful they find it to help their adult children, and how much they worry about their adult children, on a scale from 1-5, with 1 being “not at all” and 5 being ‘a great deal’.
-Finally, participants reported the amount of sleep they got each night. The wives reported sleeping 6.66Hours per night while the husbands slept about 6.69 Hours a night.
-The results included that for husbands, the support that they provided their grown children was associated with poorer sleep; conversely, the husbands slept more when their wives reported providing support for the kids. No such impact was seen in the women’s sleep.
-However, for women, sleep was impaired by experiencing higher stress with their children. Stress levels over this issue did not appear to affect how much the husbands slept.
-Overall, the study found that the giving of support itself affected the men, while stress over the support was what affected the women.
-Seidel hypothesizes that the results may be a side effect of how involved many parents are with their grown children’s lives these days…